Rachel Chinouriri trades indie rock for crying-in-the-club dance-pop on her second album ‘I Think I Spoke Too Soon.’ Our review
Rachel Chinouriri built her reputation on devastation delivered plainly. Her 2024 debut, What a Devastating Turn of Events, turned grief and English melancholy into finely observed indie rock, earning the Croydon songwriter two BRIT nominations and a reputation as one of Britain’s sharpest young confessionalists. I Think I Spoke Too Soon, out today (Oct. 16) via Parlophone and Atlas Artists, keeps the confession and swaps the setting, dragging her sadness out of the bedroom and onto the dancefloor. It is a comedown record disguised as a party, and the disguise is the point.
A Deliberate Pivot From Guitars to the Club
The most immediate shift is tempo. Where the debut simmered, I Think I Spoke Too Soon surges, a conscious BPM spike that recasts Chinouriri’s writing in iridescent synth-pop. The reference points are clear and well chosen, the glossy pulse of Donna Summer and Kylie Minogue, the arch dancefloor melancholy of LCD Soundsystem, all filtered through a very contemporary unease. Recorded between London, Hereford and Los Angeles, with contributions from collaborators including APOB, Glen Roberts and, notably, Lucy Dacus, the album is Chinouriri’s most sonically ambitious work by a distance.
Crucially, the brightness is never a cheap mask. Lead single “One Song Away From Crying” sets the template, a sequined anthem for looking immaculate and feeling the opposite, built on a subdued synth beat and the devastating self-appraisal that she has never looked better or felt worse. The whole record is framed around a single night out, following Chinouriri from the pre-drinks optimism into the bathroom mirror and back onto the floor, a conceit that could feel gimmicky but instead gives the album its spine.
Confession Under the Strobe Lights
What keeps I Think I Spoke Too Soon from collapsing into its own aesthetic is Chinouriri’s refusal to resolve anything neatly. “Broken Chair,” one of the record’s clear peaks, pairs a trumpeting synth line and cowbell-inflected drums with a chorus that is self-deprecating and defensive in the same breath, the sound of someone dancing precisely because the alternative is unbearable. “Parasite” goes darker still, and “Make Believe” is the thesis stated outright, her voice trembling over industrial production as she pleads, “If you didn’t love me then, love me now, just so I can feel it.” It is the kind of line that stops a song cold.
The album’s governing theme is the distance between who Chinouriri thinks she is and who her choices reveal her to be, a reckoning she has described as an account of her life from roughly 22 to 27, taking in sobriety, femininity and the slow dismantling of a party-girl facade. Her core philosophy, that you can change and forgive yourself in any given moment, could read as a self-help platitude, but she earns it by refusing to pretend the change is finished. The title says as much. Speaking too soon is what you do when you want to believe you have already arrived.
If there is a criticism, it is that Chinouriri occasionally states the emotional point too plainly, trading some of the debut’s novelistic restraint for directness, and a track like “Baby Steps” dances around feelings the sharper songs confront head on. A couple of moments play it safe where a bigger vocal swing would land harder. But these are quibbles against a record of real cohesion and nerve, and the early critical response, warm notices across NME, Rolling Stone UK and beyond, suggests the gamble has paid off.
That is the quiet triumph here. Plenty of artists have discovered the dancefloor as a metaphor for loneliness, but few make the contradiction feel this lived-in. Chinouriri hands you a drink, cues the beat, and lets you notice, a song or two later, that she has been crying the whole time. I Think I Spoke Too Soon is the sound of a songwriter learning that growth is messy, circular and best survived with a chorus big enough to hide inside.
